Gender

Female Lawyers, Can You Have It All?

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Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are examples of female lawyers who have it all: success in both their personal and professional lives. They both reached the pinnacle of the legal profession — a seat on the Supreme Court — but also raised families, blessing the world with judicial opinions galore, children, and grandchildren. They had time for dicta and… Well, you get the picture.

What about the most recent two females anointed with the holy SCOTUS water: Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor? They both have incredible résumés, which helped get them to One First Street, but neither one had a family to move down to D.C. with them.

On the other hand, the most recent male nominees to the Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, are both married with children. They did not have to sacrifice family for profession. (Of course, that’s assuming you see “no children or significant other” as a “sacrifice.”)

Some studies have shown marriage is advantageous for men, but disadvantageous for women. Single women often make more than single men. An old article from Forbes points out:

Without husbands, women have to focus on earning more. They work longer hours, they’re willing to relocate and they’re more likely to choose higher-paying fields like technology. Without children, men have more liberty to earn less–that is, they are free to pursue more fulfilling and less lucrative careers, like writing or art or teaching social studies.

Andrews Kurth partner Kathleen Wu recently offered career advice in the Texas Lawyer. As Ashby Jones points out at the WSJ Law Blog, the most valuable piece is to “get real about balance.” Wu wrote:

It is next to impossible to balance a full-time legal career with marriage, children and regular trips to the gym. It’s no coincidence that the two women most recently nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court — now-Justice Sonia Sotomayor and nominee/U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan — are unmarried and childless.

Can women not have it all? Elie — married and male — and Kash — single and female — opine and offer a poll, after the jump.

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Pls Hndle Thx: Eyes Are the Window to Flex Spending Accounts

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Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com.

Dear ATL,

I work in Manhattan and it’s time for me to get a new prescription for my glasses. Some of my friends are saying that I should trade in the glasses for contacts, to make me look young (I’m on the wrong side of 30). But others contend that glasses give me a distinguished look which will help my career. Still others suggest Lasik — though I’m not wild about shooting laser beams into my eyeballs.

What should I do? I’ve been delaying going to the optometrist for weeks while I ponder my options.

Four Eyes

The optician isn’t a needle exchange… you don’t have to surrender your old, dirty glasses in order to procure a clean set of contacts. This is America, you can have both, especially if you have a Flex Spending account.  The real question is whether you should roll up to work in glasses or contacts. Lasik only makes sense if you like paying money for permanent broken blood vessels and blurry night vision.

Gender plays a large role in the answer…

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K&L Gates: Closed to Associate Mothers?

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From time to time, we’ve tried to track whether or not the Biglaw layoffs have had a disparate impact on women or minorities. There hasn’t been a lot of hard evidence. We did a story last year on layoffs at Squire Sanders that seemed to disproportionately affect women. And this year we ran a report that contained statistics showing that minorities have been disproportionately hosed by the layoffs as well.

Of course, there are some good arguments that the difficulties experienced by women in larger law firms are gender-neutral. This article on TechnoLawyer explores some of those concerns.

But there is one Biglaw issue that is undeniably gender-based. Only women can give birth.

Lately we’ve been getting information suggesting we should add another group to the Biglaw endangered species watch list: mothers. Specifically, we’re hearing that the New York office of K&L Gates apparently sports zero associate mothers. There are some female partners at K&L Gates with children, but no female associate in the New York office has figured out how to breed and hang on to her job at the same time.

K&L Gates did not respond to our multiple requests for comment, but the statistics are quite shocking…

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Non-Sequiturs: 06.07.10

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Eve Tushnet

* Elie previously declared that Debrahlee Lorenzana, the too hot for Citigroup plaintiff, was “pretty,” but not “‘blood has stopped flowing to my brain’ pretty.” This video is proof that Elie underestimated her. [Dealbreaker]

* Ugly people get fired on Wall Street too. How many of these 1,200 Morgan Stanley layoffs are in the legal department? [Gothamist]

* Are large-firm gender issues actually gender issues, or just law-firm issues? [Technolawyer]

* Meet Eve Tushnet — daughter of Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet, sister of Georgetown law professor Rebecca Tushnet — the prominent lesbian writer who’s opposed to same-sex marriage. [New York Times]

* An update on that amusing oral argument in the Supreme Court: the government prevailed, with SCOTUS upholding the Bureau of Prisons method for calculating prisoner good-time credits. [Sentencing Law and Policy]

* Blawg Review #267: Venkat Balasubramani is blogging about… blogging! And social media, too. [Spam Notes via Blawg Review]

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Will New York’s Nanny Law Make It Harder for Career Women?

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The New York State Senate yesterday passed its version of the Nanny Law. If signed by Governor Paterson, the law would require employers to give domestic workers paid vacation and sick days, as well as 14 days notice before termination. The benefits would apply to legal and illegal immigrants.

Essentially, it would require people to treat domestic employees like employees instead of serfs.

It sounds like a wonderful law. It sounds like the right thing to do. It sounds … utterly unenforceable. On True/Slant, Claudia Deutsch points out:

Sure, it sounds compassionate and embracing to say that anyone, legal or not, should have a right to recourse if they are being exploited. But how exactly does an illegal immigrant sue an employer without outing himself/herself? I can see a worst-case scenario if this passes, whereby people who currently employ citizens and legals might actively seek illegals, just to avoid the cost and paperwork.

Enforcing this law will be somebody else’s problem. But for the Biglaw families out there, the real question is whether this law will cause unnecessary problems in a market that already seems to work pretty efficiently….

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InsideCounsel’s Transformative Leadership Awards: Women Lawyers to Watch

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female lawyers women lawyers attorneys old girls network

The old girls' network?

Hundreds have gathered here in Chicago for the 10th annual Inside Counsel SuperConference. Though it’s perfectly pleasant weather outside, the Fairmont Hotel meeting rooms are upholding the Windy City’s reputation for frigid temperatures.

Many of the sessions offer advice on how in-house counsel can improve their offerings to their companies and get the most from their outside counsel. One law firm that has set up shop in the vendors’ alley has an advertisement that reads, “The Billable Hour is dead… and we killed it” — a pure pander-play to cost-conscious in-house counsel.

But the conference is not dedicated solely to budget busting, belt-tightening moves. Last night was a celebration of female GCs and law firm partners, with a series of awards for successful women lawyers and the companies and firms that support them.

Winners offered advice on empowering women in the work place. I wish I’d kept count of the number of times I heard the word “mentor.” I also heard a new term: “the old girls’ network.”

So what advice did they have for the XX set?

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The Breast Pump for the Corporate Woman

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I can’t claim to know all of the difficulties nursing mothers are up against as they try to handle their personal and professional business. But I do know that the recession has pushed “work-life” balance concerns off the front page.

We’ve all heard stories about the travails of nursing mothers. Horrible stories about women who can’t get an exception to their firm’s “no curtains” policy, thus preventing breast pumping in their own office. Discriminatory stories about women who can’t get a reasonable break to do what needs to be done. We’ve heard positive stories too: like Simpson Thacher’s lactation room — which sounds like a thing nobody would call a “perk” if more women ran law firms.

However, I can’t recall any kind of technological innovation that could actually help nursing mothers manage all the things on their plate. Until now. The device below is beautiful … and terrible. It seems like one of the most unnatural contraptions ever invented to help a natural process. It is corporate and mammalian at the same time.

And it’s just a striking freaking image….

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Man Wins Sexual Discrimination Case Against Law Firm

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Angela Reinholz: Apparently getting pregnant didn't screw her enough.

It takes balls to file this kind of lawsuit.

A man working for the British firm Eversheds filed a sexual discrimination lawsuit after being fired from the firm. He claimed that the firm should have fired a woman out on maternity leave — but Eversheds didn’t because it was worried that the woman would file a sexual discrimination lawsuit.

Catch-22 for Eversheds? Maybe. The English Employment Tribunal ruled in favor of the laid off man. The Daily Mail (gavel bang: ABA Journal) reports:

John de Belin won £123,000 in damages after one of Britain’s biggest law firms ‘deprived him of his livelihood’.

Mr de Belin, 45, was one of two associates facing redundancy from Eversheds’ property division in Leeds. The other was Angela Reinholz, 40.

To decide who would be sacked, the firm undertook an assessment of both Mr de Belin’s and Mrs Reinholz’s abilities, including financial performance, discipline history and absence records.

Mr de Belin was fired in February 2009 after losing by just half a point, scoring 27 out of 39 in the exercise against Mrs Reinholz’s 27.5.

The problem was that Reinholz’s score was “inflated” while she was out on maternity leave…

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SCOTUS Speculation: Could It Be Wood?
Ten reasons Obama might appoint Diane Wood.

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Now that President Obama has interviewed the four finalists for the U.S. Supreme Court seat he has to fill — Judge Merrick Garland (D.C. Cir.), Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Judge Sidney Thomas (9th Cir.), and Judge Diane Wood (7th Cir) — the nominee could be announced any day now. Who will it be?

We realize that the betting men (and women) favor Solicitor General Elena Kagan. Kagan is also the pick of Tom Goldstein, the veteran Supreme Court litigator and founder of SCOTUSblog, who correctly forecast the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor (a nomination that the White House sought his counsel on).

But we’re going to go out on a limb and make a crazy prediction: President Obama is going to nominate Judge Diane Wood, of the Seventh Circuit, to the Supreme Court. He’ll announce the nomination on Monday, May 10 — the Monday after Mother’s Day. (That’s significant, for reasons we’ll get to later.)

Right out of the starting gate, immediately after Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement, Solicitor General Elena Kagan emerged as the frontrunner for his seat. And Kagan is still widely regarded as the leading candidate.

But, in the past week and a half or so, we’ve felt a slight, almost imperceptible shift in the wind, in favor of Judge Wood….

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Ten reasons Obama might appoint Diane Wood.“

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Female Partners Are on the Rise

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Last fall, we gave props to Sullivan & Cromwell for making a high number of women partners — four out of five, or 80 percent. If you consider only U.S.-based partners, S&C had a new partner class that was 100 percent female. (Tax partner Eric Wang is based in London.)

As it turns out, Sullivan & Cromwell wasn’t alone in having a majority-female partner class for 2010. From the Project for Attorney Retention (PDF):

The economy may be looking up, at least for the women lawyers in the 2010 new partner classes. According to a survey released today by the Project for Attorney Retention (PAR), law firms made significant advances in retaining and promoting their women lawyers: 23 firms made new partner classes that were 50% or more female, and 34% of the new partners are female, compared to 28% of the new partners in 2009.

Not all of the news was good, however: 14 firms had all-male classes.

Let’s name names, shall we?

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